You can also play with it to try and get closer to correct. I had problems with getting an Excel macro working and getting unattended-updates working on my pihole. GPT was wrong at first, but got me partly there and I could massage the question and Google and get closer to the right answer. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to get any of it, especially with the macro.

That is what is frustrating. He doesn’t really mean what you “see”. He means go with your gut/surface level feelings and understanding. If you “see” something that goes against what you see or what you feel without any specialized knowledge on the subject, go with your priors.

Interesting. I was all ready to ask how having a malicious DHCP server would matter if VPNs also use DHCP to give a client a VPN IP, but I didn’t know DHCP could do more than just hand out IPs.

You need good software to make the most out of good hardware, but I think our definition of good is different. For software, as long as the software doesn’t get in the way of launching the app you want, most normies will consider that good. It doesn’t matter that Android is bloated and inefficient if the user can tap the Instagram or Facebook icon and have that open up without user perceptible delay.

The average person is remarkably able to put up with shit. Look at the experience on smart TVs for example. The vast majority of people are fine with the absolutely shitty experience as long as they can open up Netflix.

Use what you like. Just like Windows, macOS and Linux for the vast majority of people, all these OSes are, are platforms to display apps and webpages. They all have sanded off most of the rough edges meaning that unless you have specific niche needs/wants, you’ll just use what is familar and be happy.

Life is too short to have deep feelings about an OS.

Yeah, I can’t imagine what about Graphene would make that big of a difference. Smart phones and slabs of glass with apps on them. There’s very little that truly impacts the experience after you get past specs.

That hasn’t been a concern for me since the early days of the modern smartphone era. But I can see it being an issue for older phones with worn out batteries or something.

Piracy is whatever. Using an old school ass MP3 player in 2023 is unhinged though. I’m sure their phone can do whatever that MP3 player can do just as easily.

I think it has gotten worse in that now we have higher bandwidth, faster computers, and more advanced web standards so ads can be an even higher level annoying. If we had the same type of ads back in the 90s that we have today, they would never load and if they tried to they would bring your computer to its knees.

I already cancelled my subscription. I’m going to the subscription hopping plus piracy route now for D+.

Putin won’t use nuclear weapons and he can’t realistically escalate the war.

That’s a huge bet to make. The whole point of nuclear deterrence is so nuclear powers don’t think to directly engage each other in any serious way. No one is anxious to call a nuclear bluff, especially since this is basically win or die for Putin.

When they live off, I think they mean is that enough to where you could live on that and not work. And the answer to that is no/not well in the majority of cases.

Perhaps I am cringe, but that makes me free!

…Except for when I wake up at ngiht in a cold sweat remembering cringe from years ago.

Have you ever self hosted a website? Was that a modern website, or just a bunch of text? Are you experienced with uptime SLAs on multiple services? Have you ever had to deal with a DDOS attack?

There are lots of things that Cloudflare does that requires experience and knowledge to notice or understand. And it isn’t even the biggest single point of failure when it comes to the Internet. When AWS has an outage for instance there is a huge chunk of the Internet that goes down.

There are problems with the centralization of the Internet. But this happened for a reason, and it has been so long and these services have been so reliable that people don’t even realize what it was like before.

Honestly, I don’t know how any end user who doesn’t understand IT and wasn’t around before services like Cloudflare were available can say this. They objectively don’t have the information or experience to make the claim.

That’s basically where I’m at. I want some tingling, burning and flavor, but I don’t want to feel like I’m dying either during the meal or after.

With Chromium being increasingly the only supported browser we soon won’t have a choice which browser to use for certain websites anymore (e.g. Firefox).

That’s where I disagree. I think that if we do get an internet where Chrome is the only option and it sucks, we’ll get another browser option. Firefox for example went through a few years of being a bad browser but it has gotten past those hurdles. People are lazy and change is slow, but once it starts I think it is unstoppable.

I’ve never really understood this argument. The history of browsers shows that a browser choice screen isn’t necessary. IE used to be dominant until it started sucking so much that people looked for alternatives. For a while that alternative was Firefox, then Chrome came along and people moved to that.

I think the problem for alternate browsers on PC is that all browsers are good enough at the things most people care about that they don’t look at alternatives anymore. Most pre-built computers come with Chrome pre-installed and if it isn’t, people seek it out on their own to download it. More savvy users know about Chrome’s issues, but those aren’t issues users really care about.

What does need to be addressed is how iOS and Windows either don’t really allow you to use another browser, or make it difficult to switch. iOS needs to allow other rendering engines so alternative browsers aren’t just a skin over Safari and Windows needs to stop with preventing users from changing the default browser for things like widgets.

They are kind of funny, but more because of how nonsensical and disturbing they are than any actual comedy. Just looking at the image makes my brain feel like it is skipping.

USB 3 is not USB-C. USB-C was a few years after lightning. At the time devices were shipping with Micro USB which was genuinely terrible. Apple could have made Lightning support USB3 speeds out of the box. But they didn’t and never really improved it. I think a few of their tablets did support USB 3 speeds, but weirdly not their phones.